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dc100be
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I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine.
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war
wwi
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Sebastian Faulks |
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bc7c558
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The function of music is to liberate in the soul those feelings which normally we keep locked up in the heart.
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Sebastian Faulks |
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5a013c9
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I'd never chosen to be alone, but that was the way things had turned out, and I'd grown used to it.
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solitude
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Sebastian Faulks |
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4d2128f
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Inhale and hold the evening in your lungs.
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lungs
inhale
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Sebastian Faulks |
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c2b4b36
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Have you ever been lonely? No, neither have I. Solitary, yes. Alone, certainly. But lonely means minding about being on your own. I've never minded about it.
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solitude
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Sebastian Faulks |
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8a1f8c2
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People never explain to you exactly what they think and feel and how their thoughts and feelings work, do they? They don't have time. Or the right words. But that's what books do. It's as though your daily life is a film in the cinema. It can be fun, looking at those pictures. But if you want to know what lies behind the flat screen you have to read a book. That explains it all.
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Sebastian Faulks |
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43829ab
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Something had been buried that was not yet dead.
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Sebastian Faulks |
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c74ebce
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Memory is the only thing that binds you to earlier selves; for the rest, you become an entirely different being every decade or so, sloughing off the old persona, renewing and moving on. You are not who you were, he told her, nor who you will be.
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Sebastian Faulks |
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4648451
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This is not a war, this is a test of how far man can be degraded
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Sebastian Faulks |
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4a9b29f
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One thing about London is that when you step out into the night, it swallows you.
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night
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Sebastian Faulks |
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9025c05
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Our own choices might not be as good as those that are made for us.
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Sebastian Faulks |
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ca2d947
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You put your time where your priority is.
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time
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Sebastian Faulks |
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5edf764
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The end-of-summer winds make people restless.
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summer
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Sebastian Faulks |
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c9535a7
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If at the one moment in your life when the chance of something transcendental is offered to you, if you have this chance to move beyond the surface of things, to understand - and you say, No, maybe not... What then? How do you explain the rest of your life to yourself? How do you pass the time until you die? Do you substitute for that an interest in what - eating? Do you spend the next sixty years trying to be fascinated by the act of breat..
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Sebastian Faulks |
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d772dbd
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There is nothing more sir, than to love and be loved.
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Sebastian Faulks |
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024c306
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My direction? Anywhere. Because one is always nearer by not keeping still.
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Sebastian Faulks |
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c9442f7
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He wrote one more paragraph for his own sake, to see what he had to say.
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Sebastian Faulks |
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acb7698
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From an early age she had developed the art of being alone and generally preferred her own company to anyone else's. She read books at enormous speed and judged them entirely on her ability to remove her from her material surroundings. In almost all the unhappiest days of her life she had been able to escape from her own inner world by living temporarily in someone else's, and on the two or three occasions that she had been too upset to con..
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Sebastian Faulks |
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35cfca2
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Sometimes my whole life seems like a dream; occasionally I think that someone else has lived it for me. The events and the sensations, the stories and the things that make me what I am in the eyes of other people, the list of facts that make my life ... They could be mine, they might be yours.
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Sebastian Faulks |
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dd1db38
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One of the hardest things about being alive is being with other people.
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Sebastian Faulks |
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1eff319
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But you must live your own life eventually. You have one chance only.
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Sebastian Faulks |
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e72529c
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Lonely's like any other organism; competitive and resourceful in the struggle to perpetuate itself.
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Sebastian Faulks |
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57574dc
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Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.
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pettiness
feeling
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Sebastian Faulks |
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58b2ca6
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The men loved jokes, though they had heard each one before. Jack's manner was persuasive; few of them had seen the old stories so well delivered. Jack himeself laughed a little, but he was able to see the effect his performance had on his audience. The noise of their laughter roared like the sea in his ears. He wanted it louder and louder; he wanted them to drown out the war with their laughter. If the could should loud enough, they might b..
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Sebastian Faulks |
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c2100fe
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This is how most people live: alive, but not conscious; conscious but not aware; aware, but intermittently.
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conscious
aware
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Sebastian Faulks |
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eb6ccc6
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Oh, the sweetness of giving in, of full surrender.
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Sebastian Faulks |
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42c671a
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But I think if any song can touch the heart, then one should value it.
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Sebastian Faulks |
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a64f5c8
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He saw a picture in his mind of a terrible piling up of the dead. It came from his contemplation of the church, but it had its own clarity: the row on row, the deep rotting earth hollowed out to hold them, while the efforts of the living, with all their works and wars and great buildings, were no more than the beat of a wing against the weight of time.
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Sebastian Faulks |
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8f7d3a4
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Gray stood up and came round the desk. "Think of the words on that memorial, Wraysford. Think of those stinking towns and foul bloody villages whose names will be turned into some bogus glory by fat-arsed historians who have sat in London. We were there. As our punishment for God knows what, we were there, and our men died in each of those disgusting places. I hate their names. I hate the sound of them and the thought of them, which is why ..
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Sebastian Faulks |
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622d8bf
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We all operate on different levels of awareness. Half the time I don't know what I'm doing.
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Sebastian Faulks |
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837a3ad
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The thing about opium is that it makes pain or difficulty unimaginable.
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pain
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Sebastian Faulks |
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fdecb43
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she read with undifferentiated glee . . .
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Sebastian Faulks |
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9e4c514
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I don't think you ever understand your life - not till it's finished and probably not then either. The more I live the less I seem to understand.
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Sebastian Faulks |
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4b90fc0
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As he rounded the corner, he saw two dozen men, naked to the waist, digging a hole thirty yards square at the side of the path. For a moment he was baffled. It seemed to have no agricultural purpose; there was no more planting or ploughing to be done. Then he realized what it was. They were digging a mass grave. He thought of shouting an order to about turn or at least to avert their eyes, but they were almost on it, and some of them had al..
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Sebastian Faulks |
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a8f98e6
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Names came patterning into the dusk, bodying out the places of their forebears, the villages and towns where the telegrams would be delivered, the houses where the blinds would be drawn, where low moans would come in the afternoon behind closed doors; and the places that had borne them, which would be like nunneries, like dead towns without their life or purpose, without young men at the factories or in the fields, with no husbands for the ..
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Sebastian Faulks |
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301c041
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The physical shock took away the pain of being.
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Sebastian Faulks |
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bfda900
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Time makes us pointless.
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time
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Sebastian Faulks |
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ab2c43e
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I don't know your life history, but I think children need to believe in powers outside themselves. That's why they read books about witches and wizards and God knows what. There is a human need for that which childhood normally exhausts. But if a child's world is broken up by too much reality, that need goes underground.
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Sebastian Faulks |
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2b1589d
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at such moments of extreme panic and anguish you do manage that trick with time: you are at last free from the illusion that time is linear. In panic, time stops: past, present and future exist as a single overwhelming force. You then, perversely, time to appear to run forwards because the 'future' is the only place you can see an escape from this intolerable overload of feeling. But at such moments time doesn't move. And if time isn't ru..
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time
panic-attacks
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Sebastian Faulks |
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6551c66
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It was entirely silent and I tried to breathe its peace.
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silence
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Sebastian Faulks |
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27d38d9
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Stephen watched the packets of lives with their memories and loves go spinning and vomiting into the ground. Death had no meaning, but still the numbers of them went on and on and in that new infinity there was still horror.
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Sebastian Faulks |
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d6c7e90
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Weir heard something different in the sounds. Once, during a period of calm, he sat on the firestep waiting for Stephen to return from an inspection and listened to the music of the tins. The empty ones were sonorous, the fuller ones provided an ascending scale. Those filled to the brim produced only a fat percussive beat unless they overbalanced, when the cascade would give a loud variation. Within earshot there were scores of tins in diff..
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Sebastian Faulks |
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7b1444f
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All my life I had lived on the presumption that there was no existence beyond... flesh, the moment of being alive... then nothing. I had searched in superstition... But there was nothing. Then I heard the sound of my own life leaving me. It was so... tender. I regretted that I had paid it no attention. Then I believed in the wisdom of what other men had found before me... I saw that those simple things might be true... I never wanted to bel..
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death-and-dying
war
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Sebastian Faulks |
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e45e833
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If not just the brain but the quirks that made the individual were composed of recycled matter only, it was hard to be sure where the edges of one such being ended and another person began.
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Sebastian Faulks |